A guide to trolling a tech support scammer

Pity the poor employees of companies like "Windows Technical
Support" -- scammers who make money by "fixing" computers that were
never broken in the first place. For the people who pose as Windows
support technicians and cold call unsuspecting victims to warn them
about bogus viruses, life is good as long as they can wrangle
credit card numbers and remote PC access from the gullible.

The scammer -- who is generally from India but claims to live in
the same country as the victim -- tells whoever picks up the phone
that their computer has been identified as having a virus. The
scammer directs the user to look in the Windows Event Viewer, which
shows a generally harmless list of error messages, and then says
that this is a sign of serious infection. From there, the scammer
convinces his mark to install a piece of software allowing remote
access into the computer to clean up the problem, and to pay
several hundred pounds in fees for the service. It's often known as
the "ammyy" scam because users are sometimes directed to
www.ammyy.com to install the remote desktop software.

Not everyone falls for it. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
didn't, last week busting six fake tech support companies with names like
Virtual PC Solutions and PCCare247 after having undercover agents
pose as victims. Ars editor Nate Anderson didn't fall for it,
either, playing a helpless victim on the phone for 15 minutes
before revealing that he knew what had been going on the whole
time.

But the serious "scam trolls" elevate scammer-baiting to an art
form, sometimes wasting as much as two hours on the phone as they
see just how long a scammer will stay on the line. The tech support
scam is an international phenomenon, and the scam trolls likewise
come from across the globe. Many record their interactions with the
scammers and post them for the world to hear -- and learn from.
Here's how the masters do it.

Please wait two hours while my dial-up connects to
CompuServe

While some troll scammers as a public service to prevent people
from being victimised, others are simply out for laughs. Case in
point: a person calling himself "Ted" kept a scammer on the
phone for nearly two hours, recording the last 43 minutes
and posting them
to SoundCloud last week.

A good troll is a prepared troll, and Ted was ready. He dragged
out the call by pretending to connect his Windows 95 and Windows
Vista computers to CompuServe via dial-up internet, by providing an
expired credit card number, and by providing absurd answers to
basic questions.

Ted spent much of his call pretending to struggle to connect to
the internet. "OK, so you want me to connect to the internet with
this. God, it's an hour and eight minutes we've been on the phone,
this is taking forever. All right, hold on, so this is called -- I
need to connect it to the phone. It's called an acoustic coupler…
Hold on one second. All right, it's not connecting to my CompuServe
account for some reason. Let me try my AOL account, hold on."

Ted switched back and forth between his Windows 95 and Windows
Vista computers. On Vista, Ted claimed he couldn't follow the
scammer's instructions until he finished installing the
non-existent Service Pack 3 (Vista only has two service packs).

Ted asked the scammer if he could make his Windows 95 computer
run as fast as his Windows Vista one, and professed his desire to
be a good citizen. "I want this machine to be secured, for sure,"
he said. "And I don't want my machine being dangerous, for sure, I
mean that would be bad, that would be very bad, I don't want it to
be bad, I want it to be good. I'm a responsible internet user, I
don't want to be some of these hacker types that infect the web and
stuff like that."

The scammer tried to direct Ted to the ammyy website:

Ted: So, I'm connected to CompuServe. What now, what do
you need me to do?

Scammer: I need you to open the website, www.

Ted: Hold on. www, d-o-t

Scammer: No, it's not d-o-t. It's www. Full stop.

Ted: Www dot full stop, yup.

Scammer: Sir, it's not like that, it's not like that.
Sir, how do you open up any website, sir? www.google.com.
www.yahoo.com?

Ted: Yes. Oh, I see what you're saying. I was confused,
sorry. So what site do I open? You want me to go to
fullstop.com?

Scammer: Sorry?

Ted: You said to go to fullstop.com, right?

Scammer: No. No sir. www.ammyy.com.

Through it all, Ted periodically replays the dial-up modem
connection sound when he has to "reconnect," tells the
scammer he doesn't have Internet Explorer but uses Mosaic to surf
the Web, and claims to be worried about his online banking because
he wants to move a large amount of money out of his account. After
initially providing an expired credit card number, Ted gives the
scammer a real one -- or at least one that sounds authentic enough
for the scammer to start verifying Ted's birth date and other
information.

Scammer: Confirm your date of birth, please.

Ted: Oh yes.

Scammer: Will you confirm it please?

Ted: Did you give it to me? What is it, what do you
have?

Scammer: No, you need to tell me your date of
birth.

Ted: OK. Oh, you want my date of birth right now. It's
June.

Scammer: June?

Ted: Yes.

Scammer: Ok, like, uh, June 12th , June 10th, when
is it, sir?

Ted: Oh yes. June 12th.

Scammer: Can you confirm me the year?

Ted: 1950.

Suddenly, Ted is claiming to be hot and tense and says, "I need
to take off my pants, it's way too hot." Next, he tells the scammer
to address him less formally.

Once the scammer says Ted will have to pay $700 (£435) to fix
his computer and for ongoing support, Ted tells him to add $50
(£31) for himself because of how helpful he's been. The scammer
happily accepts the tip, just before Ted concludes with a brutal,
"Thank you for two hours of your time, you dumb motherfucker," and
hangs up the phone.

Comments

Try a google search for "Crank We can fix you pc phone call"; I kept one of them on the line for 45 minutes and recorded the last 32 minutes. By the end o the conversation her was recomending all sorts of naught sites for me to visit.

Brenden

Oct 16th 2012

I love these - we get them fairly often. I've only managed twenty minutes so far so two hours is amazing.

"Sir, I want you to click on my computer" "But I don't have an icon for your computer. Why would I have an icon for your computer on my computer""No, Sir, My Computer is on your start menu.""No it isn't, there's no icon for your computer there. What's your computer called? Mine's called Bunny."

and so on..

Stu

Oct 18th 2012

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online support

Oct 29th 2012

Good information. now i discussing about Fixing Computer Problems with Remote Technical support